Is Maori Party Flirting With 2011 Electoral Doom?

Is Maori Party Flirting With 2011 Electoral
Doom?

Gordon
Campbell on the Maori Party’s perilous dance with the
National Party wolves

Eight years ago, which is
eons ago in political time, John McCain seems to have been a
more likeable guy. So much so that during the course of an
80 page essay called Up Simba that he wrote for
Rolling Stone, the late David Foster Wallace credited a
John McCain ‘town hall’ political meeting in Michigan
with providing the most human moment of the entire
presidential campaign of 2000. As Wallace wrote at the
time :

“A middle-aged man in a sportcoat and beret,
a man who didn’t look in any way unusual but turned out to
be insane…came to the mike and said that the government of
Michigan has a mind-control machine and influences
brainwaves and that not even wrapping roll after roll of
aluminium foil around your head with only the tiniest
pinpricks for eyes and breathing stopped from influencing
brainwaves, and he says he wants to know whether if McCain
is president he will use Michigan’s mind-control machine
to catch the murderers and pardon the Congress and
compensate him personally for 60 long years of government
mind control, and can he get that in writing.

And how
did McCain respond ? With instinctive decently. Wallace
continues :

The question is not funny; the room’s
silence is the mortified kind. Think how easy it would have
been for a candidate here to blanch or stumble, or to have
hard-eyed aides remove the man, or (worst) to make fun of
the guy in order to defuse everyone’s horror and
embarrassment and try to score humour points with the crowd,
at which most of the younger reporters would have probably
fainted dead away in cynical disgust because the poor guy is
standing there at the mike and looking earnestly up at
McCain, awaiting an answer.

Which McCain, incredibly,
sees—the man’s humanity, the seriousness of these issues
to him—and says yes, he will, he’ll promise to look into
it, and yes he’ll put his promise in writing, although he
“believes they have a difference of opinion about this
mind machine,” and in sum he defuses the insane man and
treats him respectfully without patronising him or
pretending to be schizophrenic too, and does it all so
quickly and gracefully and with such basic human decency
that if it was some sort of act then McCain is the very
devil himself.

The episode belongs to a primordial
past, before McCain cozied up to the Republican Party over
the war in Iraq, and before this year’s campaign pressures
and before his choice of Sarah Palin as a his running
mate– a decision that pleased the Christian base, while
alienating everyone else. Crucially, the Michigan town hall
‘moment’ happened before McCain handed the running of
his political life over to Steve Schmidt, a leading
graduate of the Karl Rove school of cynical bad faith.

Transfer the focus to our election campaign in New
Zealand and the Maori Party is starting to look a bit like
John McCain – ie, like decent folk at risk of losing
their bearings, the closer they get to ultimate power. If
McCain loses, he will have the rest of his life to get back
in touch with the human being who has gone MIA during the
past eight years. He might even resume his lifelong efforts
to liberalise immigration, which he shelved to pursue a
campaign pitch for tougher border security. The Maori Party
may not get the same chance, if they screw up this current
election opportunity.

For weeks, the opinion polls have
pointed to the possibility that the Maori Party could end up
in the kingmaker – or queen maker – role, once the
election night votes are counted. When and if the gap
between the major parties tightens up, National’s only
trusty allies for a coalition of the willing would be Act
and United Future – and that may not be enough to govern
in a Parliament likely to have an overhang, of around 124
seats in all. Enter the Maori Party, seeking policy
gifts.

Much more so the Greens, the Maori Party has been
able to credibly promote the notion they could support
either Labour or National. To date, keeping distance from
Labour has seemed like a reasonable tactical ploy, to
enhance the Maori Party’s own pitch for the list vote. To
that end, the Maori Party have pursued a “plague on both
their houses ‘ strategy, drawing upon the genuine
historical grounds for grievance among Maori, towards both
of the major parties.

So far, they have not been able to
take their own supporters with them on that journey.
According to this morning’s Marae Digipoll results in two
electorates, Maori would still overwhelmingly prefer a
ruling relationship with Labour. Barely a quarter ( at best
) of those polled favoured going into an arrangement with
National.

These poll results are not due to mere
historical sentiment. The problem for the Maori Party is
that there is no credible way it can do better for its
supporters under National – especially during a period
when Maori families and workers will be staring down the
barrel of a major economic recession that they are likely to
feel first, and hardest.

For any minor party, the
grim reality is that post-election negotiations are really
the political equivalent of a one night stand. They can be
exciting at the time, but the fun part quickly fades,
leaving the minor parties with the need ( over the next
three years ) to justify the consequences of their
dalliance.

Is it really possible for the Maori Party to
win the sort of substantial and cumulative gains from
National that could justify propping them up in government
– and if so, what could such gains possibly look like ?
Particularly in the areas of employment, income, health,
education and housing that are critical to Maori living
standards.

Of course, the Maori Party may not have to
face this dilemma in its coldest and clearest form. The
election outcome may not place the Maori Party in the sole,
decisive role. It may be only one of several options on the
table for Labour or National, and the Maori Party may even
have to clamour, and bid for attention.

Similarly, the
ensuing coalition arrangements can take many different
forms. In descending order of closeness, they can entail a
formal coalition ( as Labour currently has with the
Progressives) an agreement to support on confidence and
supply ( as with New Zealand First) or an agreement to
abstain on confidence and supply, as the Greens currently
do. One of the self correcting beauties of MMP is that the
proximity to the major party can heighten the pay-off in
policy, but the toll on the minor party’s separate
identity is then correspondingly greater. Under MMP,
supping with the devil is never a free lunch.

So lets
look at what the Maori Party could possibly gain from
lending its support to the National Party. The first two
goals are highly symbolic ones. In reality, they may offer
little of substance.

1. Entrenchment of the Maori
seats.

Supposedly, the National Party aims to hold a
general referendum on the future of the Maori seats, once
the treaty settlement process concludes in ( cross your
fingers and hope) about 2014. Lets leave aside, just for
the moment, the dubious morality of allowing the majority
to make a decisive call on whether the rights of a
significant minority in New Zealand should be extinguished.

If the Maori seats were to be protected by
constitutionally entrenching them, this would mean that a
75% level of support in Parliament would then be needed to
scrap them. Fine. Yet even so, entrenchment would be only a
shallow victory, for two obvious reasons.

One, the battle
seems unnecessary. John Key has already obliquely signalled
that he would consider amending National’s stance on
scrapping the Maori seats, if need be. More to the point,
National poses the only substantive threat to them, anyway.
Therefore, lifting this phantom threat would produce no
substantive gain, and be of no practical advantage for Maori
workers or their families. It would be the epitome of the
one night stand victory – producing headlines and bragging
rights for a day or so, but with no tangible ‘follow
through’ benefits.

2. Scrapping the Foreshore and
Seabed Act.

If National needs Maori Party support
to govern, would they agree to scrap this much reviled
legislation? That would depend on how much of a gambler Key
feels like being – and on whether he feels his government
could devise a piece of legislation able to satisfy Maori
aspirations, while ensuring non-Maori felt their rights were
being equally protected. Good luck on that.

Push - in the
shape of outright repeal - may never need to come to shove.
Of late, the Maori Party has been sounding conciliatory, and
indicating it could be satisfied with an amendment. Here for
instance, is Maori Party Co-Leader Tariana Turia talking
recently to Claire Trevett in the NZ
Herald

Turia: …[National] did say
they would have some difficulties with full repeal. What we
are prepared to do is talk with anybody about how the
legislation may well look. But what we are not prepared to
accept is that every other New Zealander would have a right
to the courts, a right to justice on property rights. The
National Party actually gives me the gripe, because they
rabbit on about people's property rights but they only see
it as for white people. And I do resent that. Property
rights are something all of us have.

Trevett: At
the last hui you were talking about amendments to it, rather
than full repeal.

Turia: I would prefer
to repeal and then sit down and look at what it is we really
want out of this. There are not large areas of the seabed
and foreshore still in Maori hands. When the government put
this in place, it might have been only 10 per cent. Why
would you go to this extent?....

For the Maori Party,
the risk is that any initial euphoria could quickly fade
into a war of attrition over the detail – in a context
where they would then have few cards left that could affect
the result, short of bringing down the government.
Re-opening the Foreshore and Seabed debate therefore, would
be fraught with the risk for the Maori Party of
under-delivering, while for everyone else, it would mean
general instability. It is unlikely a National Party
government would entertain even the perception of being held
to ransom on such an issue.

That leaves the real
battlegrounds – of health, education, welfare and income.
Already, Maori Party Co-Leader Pita Sharples has stressed
that health, education and welfare will be his party’s
main priorities in any post-election talks, and the Maori
Party is already touting specific policies in those areas
during the election campaign. They include the removal of
GST from food, the abolition of all income tax on incomes
below $25,000, and a universal child benefit that would (
presumably) be able to be capitalized for housing loan
purposes.

The Agenda TV programme has already costed this
package at about $5 billion. In reality, a National
government could move only a small way towards meeting those
goals. Taking GST off food is not a practical option.
Probably, the child benefit policy offers the most likely
room for movement, subject to cost.

On health, education
and welfare the Maori Party appear to be envisaging a major
constitutional re-arrangement based on the Treaty, which
will deliver more resources, and more autonomy on how those
gains are to be delivered. The details of just how this
freshly invigorated Treaty partnership would work have yet
to be spelled out. Clearly. the intention is to go beyond
simply holding the Maori Affairs portfolio- which Turia,
during her Herald interview earlier this month, largely
discounted as being only a policy ministry.

For their
part, National are putting precious little on the table as
to how a deal with the Maori Party could be made more
palatable to Maoridom. Where the two parties do currently
cross over is on the issue of welfare. Turia has recently
restated her interest in scrapping the dole. This is part
of the ongoing Turia/Sharples critique of welfarism, first
clearly stated by Sharples over 18 months ago.

While the
corrosive effects of chronic welfare dependence are easy to
denounce, any merely punitive approach ( ie, removing the
safety net ) would be socially irresponsible. All the
evidence from the 1990s – the last time that National
tried to tackle welfare dependency – shows that make-work
schemes that replace the dole do not work.

Besides being expensive
to run, such schemes have been shown to actually make it
less – and not more - likely that the people subjected to
them will go on to find real jobs.

To date, Turia
has been vague about what she thinks should replace the
dole, and how much it might cost. Her preference seems to
be for real jobs along the lines of the old PEP schemes,
but situated this time in infrastructural projects, such as
roading. Bad timing. The domestic economic recession and
the current global financial instability are likely to
postpone the kind of infrastructural investment she is
talking about, and on which the Maori Party’s anti-welfare
edifice currently depends. It would take an imminent total
collapse – and the reversion to 1930s style work camps –
to bring forward a sufficient number of infrastructural
projects.

In sum, the gains for Maoridom from a governing
relationship with National look to be illusory. Nothing
tangible is in the offing to compensate for the likely
downsides of keeping a National government in office. To
name only a few, these would include : a more punitive
approach on law and order, on benefit entitlements and in
the sphere of industrial relations. It would signal an end
to the hikes in the minimum wage on which Maori workers
disproportionately depend, and little or no gains for most
Maori families from the regressive tax cut programme that
the National Party has already announced. Income inequality,
with all of the negative social effects that this brings in
its wake, would be likely to return to the 1990s rates of
increase. The Maori Party would be justifiably crucified by
its supporters, it it was abetting such trends.

As a
side effect, such outcomes could also compromise some
individuals within the Maori Party, in the same way that a
similar deal with National would threaten party unity among
the Greens. The likes of Hone Harawira and Sue Bradford have
spent their lives establishing their credibility and their
commitment to working people - and a deal with National
could wipe out such reputations, virtually overnight.

Like the Greens, the Maori Party may just have been
bluffing about National all along, in order to broaden their
voting catchment during the election campaign. The Greens
have now made their preference pretty clear. Perhaps the
Maori Party should come clean, and state their own
preference - while leaving plan B as the less desirable
option that could be revisited with caution and with full
consultation, if need be. Because right now, any tactical
advantage from playing hard to get ( vis a vis Labour ) is
only compromising the Maori Party’s reputation for
principle. Its supporters are smarter than that, and deserve
better.

After all….it is always risky to give your core
supporters nightmares and stomach lurches, merely in the
hope of luring a few stray fish in your direction. There are
sharks out there as well, and does the Maori Party really
want to be inviting them to come swimming into its net?

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